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follow through.
    I had to go out there, shoot the basket, fumble, trip, foul and withdraw.
    So I did.
    Jimmie climbed down off a tractor overgrown with vines at the edge of trees as I came up the drive. The ruts coming in were bad enough, but these were worse. I lumbered over them, the low-slung Datsun bottoming out again and again, hood heaving up and crashing back down like a ship in heavy sea. I hit the brake and rocked to a stop. Jimmie stood by the big house waiting.
    Okay. I’d indulge in a few moments’ small talk and tell him sorry, obviously I have the wrong person. Wrong town, maybe. Completion, closure. Then back the Z up, U-turn, and get the hell out of there.
    But I saw in his eyes, or thought I saw, some trace of recognition. And something about his face, something in the pace and cadence of his words, was familiar.
    â€œCan I help you, sir?” he said, keeping a distance.
    â€œI…I seem to have lost my way. Can you tell me how to get back to the interstate?”
    â€œWell, I reckon you’re lost all right. Leastways the highway is.” He laughed. “But you just turn around and go on back down the way you came a few miles, and when you fetch up against the creek, you turn left. Don’t you cross the creek, now, just turn at it. Mile or two farther along, you’ll see your highway.”
    â€œGot it. Thanks.”
    He stepped closer to the car.
    â€œI know you?”
    â€œDon’t see how.”
    â€œNot from these parts, then?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAnd I been here my whole life. But I do know you. We’ve met up before.” He shook his head and shrugged. “In some other life, maybe. Who knows about these things? You okay now on finding your highway?”
    I said yes, thanked him again and sailed back down the ruts.
    Who indeed knows?
    As I’d told the postal clerk, before this man I thought I was making up out of whole cloth took on flesh and spoke to me: What do we have if we don’t have our memories?
    What I believed pure invention had become more, seemed in fact to have made its way to the surface from some clandestine well of memory.
    What if memory itself, in turn—his, my own—were only invention?

19
    For the next hundred miles a Ford Escort moved up to number one on the charts.
    Talk about protective coloration. A Ford Escort?
    It picked me up not long after Carl’s Bay and the unseen sniper. A Dodge van had come around some miles back, so for a while it was a toss-up, both with a bullet, as they say, but then the van turned off and never came back, meaning either that it didn’t figure at all, or that it was running a classic A-B tail and had passed me on to the Ford.
    So that’s the song we were dancing to.
    I drove along thinking of those first weeks in the Buick following my retirement, the endless miles of highway I covered and recovered, all the open road I had felt beginning to unfurl in my mind and life, Brubeck and Bird and Sidney Bechet unwinding on the tape player the whole time. That stuff wasn’t readily available then; I’d paid dearly to have collectors dub it for me from their stashes of old records and acetates.
    I thought of men long since dead, of a woman’s face in Chile, of part of a child I found beside the road one morning in Salvador. I remembered what it felt like when someone died there beside you, how your own body became in that instant instantly more real, more alive.
    I wondered what use a soldier with a conscience could possibly be, and if indeed I had one (but I was here, wasn’t I?), and what conscience was.
    No more trustworthy, no less unreconstructed, perhaps, than was memory?
    Just after lunch the Escort ceded favor to a Mazda pickup that paced me at such a calm distance I became certain I was this time in the presence of a pro.
    Mazda sat uncomplaining in a vacant lot the whole while I stretched a steakhouse dinner to almost two hours. When I left, it came